Montgomery Bus Boycott

On December 5, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, supporters of the Civil Rights Movement began a thirteen-month boycott against the city’s bus system as a protest against its policies of racial segregation. The boycott was lead by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and was triggered by seamstress Rosa Parks, who days earlier had been arrested for refusing to move to the back to of the bus to make room for a white passenger.

"The boycott was planned at a meeting in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s church. They formed a group called the Montgomery Improvement Association with Martin Luther King, Jr. as the leader. After the first day of the boycott, the group voted to continue the boycott." This Duckster article is part of their Civil Rights for Kids lesson, and has lots of links to related topics, and related games and puzzles.

With four short videos and an introductory article, History.com is a great place to start your research for a school report on the Montgomery Bus Boycott. "The boycott took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. Four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested and fined for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man."

"Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional." For high-school and college students, this encyclopedia article from King Research and Education Institute offers hyperlinks to related articles, a complete bibliography for offline research, and a gallery of primary source documents. These documents include Rosa Park's December 1, 1955 arrest report, a "Don't Ride the Bus" leaflet (dated December 2, 1955) and a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser explaining "the use of Gandhi-like tactics."

In the months before Parks refused to give her bus seat to a white man, several other black women had also been arrested for similar incidents. Why was it Park's refusal that lead to the Montgomery bus boycott? Learn more about the boycott and its place in the civil rights movement in this online special published by the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper. Best click is the interactive time line (covering from 1954 to 1957) with embedded video clips.

This illustrated article from USHistory.org (published by the Independence Hall Association in Philadelphia) explains Rosa Parks' role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and introduces Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was at that time a "little-known minister") and his colleague Ralph Abernathy. "The demands they made were simple: Black passengers should be treated with courtesy. Seating should be allotted on a first-come-first-serve basis, with white passengers sitting from front to back and black passengers sitting from back to front."